Optic Nerve 14 at Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami

Phillip Valys, Sun Sentinel

The experimental short films on tap for Friday's Optic Nerve 14 may, at first look, be the stuff of serious filmmaking. One filmmaker's short, "The Evangelists," draws on a quartet of devout Evangelicals who set fire to buildings and spout apocalyptic ramblings about 2012; another, titled "Last Night," is a voyeuristic horror film; while Carmen Tiffany's "The Accident" chronicles the argument between a princess and a unicorn after a traffic accident, no doubt a commentary on …

"It was inspired by 'SpongeBob SquarePants' and 'Yo Gabba Gabba!'" deadpans the 30-year-old filmmaker from Hollywood, one of 16 entrants whose shorts will premiere at the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami's homegrown festival. "I watch a ton of cartoons for research – OK, I'm obsessed with them – mainly because there's a fine line between children's media and adult themes. So many adult references exist in cartoons with subject matter that flies over children's heads, and I like the push and pull of visceral grown-up realities and these sugarcoated aesthetics."

Tiffany's 4 1/2-minute short – a surreal entry that depicts the princess and unicorn as cartoon animations and as live-action puppets with oversize heads – is among 15 other finalists scheduled to screen at MOCA, which has been showing such experimental videos of five minutes or less since 2000.

Bonnie Clearwater, MOCA's executive director as well as an Optic Nerve juror and the festival's curator, was on a panel that winnowed down the finalists from a field of 271 submissions. Other panelists were Stephanie Dodes of New York City's outdoor theater Big Screen Plaza, MOCA education coordinator Jillian Hernandez and Miami artist Carlos Rigau. Screening attendees will pick an "audience favorite" by secret ballot, while the MOCA selects the overall winner, which will be purchased for the museum's permanent collection.

Optic Nerve, which used to exclusively showcase South Florida filmmakers, began accepting national entries last year, Clearwater says. "Optic Nerve has always drawn an enthusiastic audience, starting out as a way to seek out and give a launching pad to South Florida artists working in film and video," she says. "It gives South Florida audiences the chance to see new work by emerging and underrecognized artists."

Recent years saw the festival capably freaking out its audiences with the art-film debuts of local performance-art luminaries Antonia Wright, Susan Lee-Chun and Jillian Mayer, whose outre art video, "I Am Your Grandma," went viral on YouTube. This year's crop has work from San Francisco moviemaker Bill Fontana, whose "Acoustical Visions of the Golden Gate Bridge" imagines the West Coast structure as a musical instrument with a microphone and two pairs of fog horns; New York-based Yuliya Lanina's "Dodo Valse" presents a four-minute meditation about anthropomorphized plants living "in an ephemeral world of utopia"; and Seattle entrant Rodrigo Valenzuela's five-minute "Diamond Box" explores the lives of illegal migrant workers.

Count among the national finalists Philadelphia artist Jared Dyer, whose "Bill Cosby Gives a Lecture" is inspired by the self-described "weird" pastime of his youth in Central Florida: diving into bargain VHS bins at Walmart and dollar stores, absorbing into his 10-year-old brain 1980s standup comedy specials, Hollywood blooper videos and arcane Charles Bronson titles. Of his favorite treasure, the 1983 comedy "Bill Cosby: Himself," Dyer edited every laugh track from the film into a 90-second short that features the comedian's goofiest expressions at a 1985 university lecture.

"I have this vestigial memory of movies that turned out to be unimportant to popular culture. This is the man's magnum opus," the 24-year-old finalist says. "I just took out all of the jokes and left in all of the laugh tracks. It's a means of looking at standup in another way, and yet it's still funny because the sound of laughter makes other people laugh."

Cuban-born filmmaker Juan Carlos Zaldivar, a three-time Optic Nerve finalist, will introduce his new short, "Shift," a five-minute, stop-motion animation short that demanded 10,000 photographs be snapped over 18 months of filming. Shot sporadically near Key West with assemblage/sculpture artist Anja Marais, Zaldivar plotted "Shift" around the struggle for identity, following a paper-sculpture character born from a tree. When its face is stolen by a rabid dog, the character (both portrayed by Zaldivar and Marais to keep its gender ambiguous) wanders the landscape in search of its vision.

"I think part of it is about the relationship of humanity to nature and technology," says the 45-year-old Miamian, whose two other Optic entries, "Marti and I" and "Horror (Horror Sickness)," likewise tackle themes of identity. "The way we filmed it is old-school – still photography – but we needed to show that the character is like an alien, wedded to the environment. Its skirt looks like a rock, its veins look like tree roots. They could be interchangeable."

As a past Optic Nerve juror, Zaldivar says experimental film, compared to other media, is still a misunderstood beast. "In the scheme of things, music and dance have been around for centuries, film is still a baby and art films are practically an embryo. Having this at a museum creates the dialogue about how art films are evolving, not just here in Miami, but everywhere."